End of the road for Firefox 1.5 next month, 2.0 gets updates

Firefox 1.5 users are "strongly encouraged" to get off of their butts and …

Mozilla announced yesterday that the organization will only continue to support version 1.5.0.x of the browser through late April. The information came via a security update for both Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, with an extra note saying that the older version will be "maintained with security and stability updates until April 24, 2007." After that date, Firefox 1.5 will no longer receive updates from Mozilla and all remaining users should upgrade to Firefox 2 if they want to keep receiving updates to the browser.

The security update to Firefox 1.5 (version 1.5.0.11) only included one update to Firefox's FTP protocol. The passive command (PASV) allowed the FTP protocol to request an alternate data port, but also allowed some FTP servers to use the "feature" to portscan machines inside of a firewall. By itself, a portscan is not dangerous, but the information it provides could aid an attacker, so Mozilla disabled this functionality.

The same update was made to Firefox 2, bringing that version up to 2.0.0.3. The organization also added "various web compatibility regressions" to Firefox 2.

Mozilla's move to kill off Firefox 1.5 so soon could prove a challenge for corporate IT departments, which are often much slower than home users to perform mass upgrades of software. Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 still receives updates for this purpose, despite the company having moved onto bigger and better things with IE 7. The group's aggressive "end-of-life" date for the earlier Firefox might worry IT managers who want to ensure that long-term support for products is available before deploying them.